Recent Academic News
December 11, 2023: Dr. Allen Shaughnessy and colleagues in the US and France looked at whether evidence was selectively used to support guidelines from the American Diabetes Association. Published in the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice.
June 2, 2023: Dr. Adam Gaffney, a CHA pulmonologist and critical care doctor was the lead author of a study that showed that millions of adults in the United States are not taking their medications as prescribed because of costs.
May 19, 2023: Postpartum women experience higher levels of medical debt than other women, according to a study published online May 18 in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. Jordan Cahn, M.D., from Cambridge Health Alliance in Massachusetts, and colleagues evaluated the association between childbirth and medical debt among postpartum U.S. women. The analysis included responses from 12,163 participants (aged 18 to 49 years) in the 2019 to 2020 National Health Interview Survey (645 women with a live birth in the past year).
April 21, 2023: A new study led by researchers from the Health Equity Research Lab at Cambridge Health Alliance found that transgender and gender diverse (TGD) Medicare beneficiaries who had depression diagnoses had higher mental health treatment rates than a comparison group of beneficiaries with depression in 2009-2016, but they still experienced higher rates of poor mental health outcomes. This work was recently published in Transgender Health and led by Dr. Ana M. Progovac (she/her), a senior scientist at CHA and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School.
January 23, 2023: A study published in Preventive Medicine shows that CHA is leading the way in delivering exceptional colorectal cancer screening rates for diverse patient populations and providing a model other health systems can emulate to tackle racial and ethnic disparities.
October 18, 2022: In a research letter published by the Annals of Internal Medicine, critical care physician Adam Gaffney, MD, MPH, and CHA Dept. of Medicine faculty members David Himmelstein, MD, and Steffie Woolhandler, MD, MPH, reported that 1.3 million Americans — 16.5% of all adults with diabetes who use insulin — rationed the life-saving drug last year to save money. The study received extensive media coverage from outlets including NBC News, CNN, the Boston Globe, USA Today, and New Scientist.
September 16, 2022: A new study from CHA researchers linked medical debt with worse health outcomes. The study, published in JAMA Network Open, found that Americans with medical debt were two to three times more likely to struggle with housing and food insecurity — key social determinants of health. The study authors wrote that low and middle-income Americans carry the majority of medical debt, with the highest-income and highest-educated Americans "relatively spared." Learn more.
March 7, 2022: CHA joins other Boston hospitals in a nationwide effort to study the long-term effects and prolonged symptoms of COVID-19. This effort, part of the National Institutes of Health "Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery" (RECOVER) Initiative, aims to better understand and define the constellation of long-term complications of COVID infection and lay the groundwork for preventing and treating symptoms. Learn more.
October 15, 2021: CHA physician-teacher Dr. David Hirsh co-authored a thought-provoking article in the Journal of Graduate Medical Education entitled The Residency Match: Escaping the Prisoner's Dilemma. This piece articlated the need to decrease investment in identifying the “best students” or the “best programs” and instead realize the common goal of helping medical students succeed in their careers.
July 26, 2021: CHA research, pubished in the journal Health Equity, found wide variation in gains in health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act for Black, Hispanic and low-income Americans. While the best performing states were able to reduce rates of uninsurance among Black, Hispanic and low-income adults by approximately 60%, the worst performing states reduced uninsurance by less than 10%, a six-fold difference.
July 6, 2021: CHA research, published in the journal Health Affairs, shows that Spanish-speakers receive about one third less care than other Americans, and key language-based gaps have widened over the past two decades.
Mar. 11, 2021: CHA Surgeon Dr. Arundhati Ghosh receives A. Clifford Barger Excellence in Mentoring Award from Harvard Medical School.
See more CHA research on Pub Med